Caring For Holocaust's Survivors

The Allies Began Liberating Nazi Death Camps 50 Years Ago, But Until One Man Spoke Out, Some Survivors Couldn't Tell Much Difference.

April 16, 1995|By Anne Groer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Fifty years ago this month Allied soldiers liberated the first of dozens of Nazi death camps. But for the thousands of tortured and emaciated inmates, life remained much the same.

Thousands continued to die of disease and malnutrition. Starved survivors of concentration, labor and death camps got the same food rations as their well-fed former enemies.

It would take the efforts of a little-known Philadelphia lawyer - Earl G. Harrison Sr. - before camp conditions improved dramatically.

''As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them,'' Harrison wrote in an August 1945 report to President Harry Truman on camp conditions.

On May 8, the 50th anniversary of what became known as V-E Day, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will honor Harrison with a posthumous ''Medal of Remembrance'' for his efforts to improve camp conditions.

The next day, the museum will open an eight-month exhibit on the Allied liberation of the camps.

Among the photos, films, artifacts and eyewitness accounts of GIs will be Harrison's battered, black leather diary that formed the basis of his report, which found that:

Camps were still run like prisons, surrounded by barbed-wire fences.

Months after liberation many survivors had nothing to wear but concentration camp garb or, worse, uniforms of their Nazi tormentors.

There was no organized effort to help desperate survivors find lost parents, children, siblings or spouses, whom many had not seen for four or five years.

Less than three months after V-E Day, an Army chaplain told Harrison he had seen 23,000 burials at the liberated Bergen-Belsen camp.

''One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this (treatment), are not supposing that we are following, or at least condoning Nazi policy,'' wrote Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school.

He condemned the U.S. military command for ignoring Holocaust survivors' special physical and psychological needs.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, ordered that Jews be classified by their country of origin rather than as a distinct, persecuted minority to avoid giving them preferential treatment.

The attitude of Gen. George S. Patton of the Third Army aggravated the situation.

''Harrison and his ilk believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to Jews, who are lower than animals,'' Patton wrote in his diary in September 1945.

The liberators - mostly American and British - simply could not, or would not, cope with the post-war chaos described in Harrison's scathing report to Truman.

''The good news is that the camps were liberated and there developed some individual relationships between liberators and survivors,'' said Holocaust Museum spokeswoman Mary Morrison. ''The bad news was the significant numbers of deaths in the camps.''

To be sure, Harrison found much about the Allies' efforts heroic.

Less than three months after V-E Day, 4 million of 6 million displaced Europeans had been returned to their countries, which he called ''a phenomenal performance.''

As many as 11 million people were considered displaced persons (DPs), having fled or been forcibly removed from their homes.

Harrison also found that some Allied-run camps had children's centers, hospitals and schools.

By 1947, about 60 camps for Jews were operating in the American and British sectors of Germany and Austria, and an inmate ''baby boom'' was in progress.

Allied forces worked closely with the United Nations and private relief groups to distribute food, clothing and medicine to 200,000 surviving Jews and several million DPs.

The last camp to close was Bergen-Belsen, in 1957.

''My father was overwhelmed by the suffering,'' said Earl Harrison Jr., headmaster of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.

''I recall reading an account by one camp survivor who remembered my father coming through: 'He sat chain-smoking with tears streaming out of his eyes for hours and hours,' '' Harrison said.

The elder Harrison noted there were only two places the Jews wished to go: back home to search for relatives, or to Palestine, where they would finally feel safe after years of persecution and death.

After a 1946 Polish massacre of returning Jews, however, Palestine became the only destination for some 100,000 ''hard core Jews,'' Harrison wrote to Truman.

Escaping Europe was not so easy.

The British, who controlled Palestine until it became Israel in 1948, feared that a massive Jewish influx would incite Palestinian Arabs.

Harrison, a former U.S. immigration commissioner, urged that the United States relax its stringent quota on Jews, particularly for those with family in this country.

There really was no choice, Harrison wrote to Truman.

''The civilized world owes it to this handful of survivors to provide them with a home where they can again settle down and begin to live as human beings.''